Rumour: 5GB will be available to developers for PS4 games

Sony has issued a statement to Eurogamer clarifying how memory works on PS4.

This comes after the same site posted an article claiming that developers would only have 3.5GB of RAM free for games, with another 1GB of RAM freeing up if the system allowed.

Here's the statement in full for those tech heads out there that actually care:

We would like to clear up a misunderstanding regarding our "direct" and "flexible" memory systems. The article states that "flexible" memory is borrowed from the OS, and must be returned when requested - that's not actually the case.

The actual true distinction is that:

"Direct Memory" is memory allocated under the traditional video game model, so the game controls all aspects of its allocation.

"Flexible Memory" is memory managed by the PS4 OS on the game's behalf, and allows games to use some very nice FreeBSD virtual memory functionality. However this memory is 100 per cent the game's memory, and is never used by the OS, and as it is the game's memory it should be easy for every developer to use it.

We have no comment to make on the amount of memory reserved by the system or what it is used for.

According to Eurogamer, what this means is that 4.5GB of conventional RAM will be available to developers, while another 512MB of on-chip RAM is also free if necessary. In other words, of the 8GB of GDDR5 on PS4, 5GB is available to developers and not 3.5 as previously stated.

Not to mention Sony will likely manage to streamline the OS as time goes on (like they did with the XMB). It's better for them to reserve too much memory and then shrink the OS footprint down than the other way around.

James
3 years ago

Firstly, according to Eurogamer report it is 4.5 gigs for games plus 1gigs of flexible memory, not 3.5 gigs like you stated in the beginning of your article. Secondly, Sony haven't revealed memory allocation specifics, so we can assume Eurogamer are false until proven true. Thirdly, from reading around, there are a few developers claiming their using 6 gigs of memory for their PS4 games, The Witness game is currently only using 5 gigs at the minute according to Jonathan Blow. Hopefully things get cleared up soon.

Snake-V2
3 years ago

Yeah, looking at various other news sites around the interwebs this has been pretty much debunked with the actual number being higher than the original EG/DF article.

Joe2120
3 years ago

James the reference at the top of the article relates to the previously reported article. The reference at the bottom refers to the newly rumoured figure. Imo only Sony have the true answer, though I'd imagine 5gb to devs to be more accurate.

PrometheusFan
3 years ago

It's looking more and more like this story was a load of bullshit concocted by Rich Leadbetter on Digital Foundry, who has been wrong several times about things he and his "sources" have heard about PS4. Several developers have said he is wrong on Twitter I believe, though obviously they nor Sony are going to talk exact specs, when people who actually know the hardware tell you a bundle of speculation is wrong that's pretty much all she wrote on the matter. Probably won't hear actually spec info until the hardware is in the wild.